A Lawsuit Norm Coleman Can Look Back on Losing

The Minneapolis-St.Paul Star-Tribune has the story. Norm Coleman’s lawsuit over the recount process in the Senate race with Al Franken was dismissed by Minnesota’s Supreme Court. Coleman finally took this as a sign that maybe it was time to concede, where any of the lower court rulings against his case had not.

The article mentions “gracious” being applied to Coleman’s behavior, and I’ve seen the same in comments to articles elsewhere. I can understand Franken using the word; it’s expected of politicians to emit noises that sound magnanimous when given a victory, even if privately he may think something more in line with standard human experience. But I find it utterly bewildering for anyone not Al Franken to even wander around in associative space near “gracious” to describe someone who spent months doggedly pursuing litigation and having his office issue pointed accusations of wrong-doing all around. It’s like the line from “Apocalypse Now”:

We cut ’em in half with a machine gun and give ’em a Band-Aid.

Handing out the Band-Aid counts as a legitimate meaning of “gracious” for some people.